Terrorism - no longer a concern?

Thank you for the welcome, Palm boy. I hope my contributions make a good impact on the blog.

As a companion article to Palm boy's posts about 9/11 and the Muslims' "religion of peace":

“…Those who believe that those 19 terrorists did the worst that terrorists could ever realistically do to the country might believe that one lucky attack – one piercing of the homeland defense – does not justify the forward defense involved in the invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq. They see the various surveillance programs as overkill, and the London arrests as evidence not of the need for continued and increased vigilance, but of the effectiveness of in-place programs.

Those who think that 9/11 could have been worse, and that the terrorists plan other attacks, recoil from the prospect of letting down our collective guard or decreasing the sense of urgency.

The urgency in the president’s, vice president’s, and the secretary of defense’s speeches over the past fortnight has been dismissed by their political opponents as fear-mongering, cynical posturing in the run-up to the November elections.

President Bush strikes his supporters as committed to completing his tenure without another devastating attack, one perhaps exponentially more deadly than the last. They understand his addresses to be the plain-spoken warnings of a leader who wakes up every day to a briefing about terrorist plotting around the globe.

President Bush’s most powerful argument: the words of our enemies. Americans who believe the worst of the president and his administration have to believe as well that our enemies are either blowhards or incompetents. But Americans who take seriously those threats hope they will never be unarguably proven right.”

With our enemies already taunting us with threats of what they will do when they develop their nuclear bomb (namely, blowing Israel and anyone who sides with Israel off the map), it’s a wonder that anyone can still be blinded to their aggressive plots to damage our homeland. Almost every day we hear about how someone was put in danger due to terrorism, whether it be the plans to hijack planes or to blow up centers of activity.

So how can anyone believe otherwise?

It all comes down to the well-known adage: “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”

Sometimes we get too caught up in internal battles (wars over abortion, skirmishes with global warming, debates regarding homosexual "rights") to realize how important and pressing the matter at hand is: protecting our homeland from any more attacks and working to control the fires of hate in the Middle East.

DDL is a staff writer for Pushing Back the Frontiers of Ignorance.

Article source: “Interpreting 9/11”, by Hugh Hewitt, World Magazine.